CIAUD Research Centre for Architecture, Urban Planning and Design

With a proper design, domestic furniture may enable a more flexible use of dwellings, helping to solve use conflicts that arise from household dynamics. But which are dwellers’ activities that face more use conflicts or constrains?
To answer this question, a comprehensive approach was used including interviews with dwellers and analysis of their dwelling space. Nine households of five different types were studied. All of them lived in small and congested houses. The interviews and analysis focused on dwellers needs and space use conflicts.
The main conclusions are that activities that face more constrains are (i) being in private, (ii) receiving guests and (iii) storage of personal objects & clothes. In cramped dwellings social areas are compromised, creating serious difficulties to daily life group activities. These results enlighten relevant challenges to furniture design.

With a proper design, domestic furniture may enable a more flexible use of dwellings, helping to solve use conflicts that arise from household dynamics. But which are dwellers’ activities that face more use conflicts or constrains?
To answer this question, a comprehensive approach was used including interviews with dwellers and analysis of their dwelling space. Nine households of five different types were studied. All of them lived in small and congested houses. The interviews and analysis focused on dwellers needs and space use conflicts.
The main conclusions are that activities that face more constrains are (i) being in private, (ii) receiving guests and (iii) storage of personal objects & clothes. In cramped dwellings social areas are compromised, creating serious difficulties to daily life group activities. These results enlighten relevant challenges to furniture design.

The dwellings in old city centres are usually smaller than those found in new residential areas. The usual approach to make old dwellings meet current space standards is to change their spatial configuration. These changes demand building works that are expensive and not always technically feasible. Instead, we propose to increase the efficiency of domestic space use through furniture that allows multiple (e.g., cooking, dining and living at the same time) or successive (e.g., living during the day and sleeping during the night) uses of domestic spaces. This option is cheap and fully reversible, being therefore more sustainable.
The paper presents a survey of furniture used to ensure the flexible use of dwellings. It focus on furniture used for sleeping, dining and living. Three research questions are addressed: What conceptual approaches can be used to design furniture that enables a flexible use of space? Which operational strategies are more frequently used to design these pieces of furniture? Are these pieces of furniture mass produced or prototypes?
The following tasks were carried out: i) set the selection criteria, ii) make an object data sheet, iii) gather and classify data, and iv) analyse results. The criteria to build the sample of furniture was the variety of type of objects (e.g., bed, table, cabinet, sofa), the diversity of strategies used to ensure flexibility (e.g., swivel, telescopic, assemble) and the innovation or relevance in furniture design evolution. For the analysis, each piece of furniture was classified in a table according to the object type, the dwelling function and the strategy to ensure flexibility. The classifications obtained for all items in the sample were summed up to draw conclusions.
The results are that the pieces of furniture more frequently used to ensure flexibility are room dividers for sleeping privacy, expandable/collapsible dining tables for dining, and container expanding systems for living. Multifunctional objects that maximize the use of space were found for the three functions. The strategies that are applied more frequently to promote furniture flexibility are hinging, telescopic and assembling. These strategies are applied in pieces of furniture that have robust structures and are made of long lasting materials. In contrast, the least used strategies are inflating, rolling and compressing. These strategies are applied in pieces of furniture made of soft materials and associated with objects of short term use. Finally, most used strategies are applied to mass produced objects. In contrast, less frequent strategies are applied on prototypes that serve conceptual or artistic purposes.
The main conclusion drawn from the study was that there are many past and present solutions of furniture that ensure a flexible use of the dwelling. The results shed light over a subject that is not common in mainstream furniture design. The strategies organized and illustrated in the paper, provide inspiration for more sustainable furniture designs.

In Portugal, the coastline’s human occupation – whose urban expression, located in a land-sea transition, is designated as coastal area – derives from its ecological condition (considering ecology in its broader sense), that is, from the interdependence between the human need for a cultural and biological appropriation of available resources, and those resources’ suitability to such demands. From a sustainable viewpoint, the mode of production and products’ consumption in a given economic context must be considered: what was initially exploited in an integrated way, was later submitted to mechanical processes, whose exploitation rhythm surpassed its local scope. Through a categorization process of Setúbal case study’s urban occupation, expressed in a certain Sea Architecture, this paper intends to describe an interpretation methodology of the coastal areas, that considers its ecological condition.

In Portugal, the traditional urban occupation of coastal areas (as a sea-land transition, with a high ecological dynamic and complex ecosystem) was confined to the biophysical suitable conditions (hydrography, soil and climate) based on sea resources subsistence, complemented by land exploitation. In this context, the Sea Architectures, as a cultural expression of its potential, respected those conditions by applying traditional materials and construction techniques available in the region. However, an urban occupation model based on industrial production methods became later unsuited to the natural transformation processes of the landscape. Since then, the memories of the local communities were disconnected from their temporal borders and spatial experience, which resulted in a progressive uprooting due to a loss of affection, making the coastal areas’ preservation pointless.

In this sense, the present communication proposal intends to present an alternative analysis and diagnosis methodology of coastal areas, according to an integrated interpretation of their landscape. It consists in a morpho-typological characterization of its biophysical functional systems and human occupation processes, with an approach simultaneously morphological (related to the physical) and typological (related to the symbolical). A set of methodological steps will be described, comparing different sources of information and scales of observation, to determine the main territorial specificities and local culture framework, ensuring the natural transformation processes of the landscape. This methodology allows us to understand the relationship between the human needs and biophysical conditions, by which we’ll be able to develop a suitable preservation strategy of coastal areas, recovering their Sea Architectures.

In Portugal, the coastline's human occupation-whose urban expression, located in a land-sea transition, is designated as coastal area-derives from its ecological condition (considering ecology in its broader sense), that is, from the interdependence between the human need for a cultural and biological appropriation of available resources, and those resources' suitability to such demands. From a sustainable viewpoint, the mode of production and products' consumption in a given economic context must be considered: what was initially exploited in an integrated way, was later submitted to mechanical processes, whose exploitation rhythm surpassed its local scope. Through a categorization process of Setúbal case study's urban occupation, expressed in a certain Sea Architecture, this paper intends to describe an interpretation methodology of the coastal areas, that considers its ecological condition.